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Our second paper deals with a book review of Alvin Toffler’s recent work, The Power Shift. The review is made by Dr. seyyed Ali Akbar Afjeh and involves a brief description of the content of the book as well as a critique of the main premise of the author. As you are well aware, Toffler is a well-established sociologist and journalist in the United States and his vision of the world has influenced economists and politicians in the advanced industrial nations. Toffler envisions the decade of 1990’s as a period of dramatic change in the foci of world powers, from a conventional posture of the American and former Soviet super powers to the up and coming champions like Japan and Germany.
Causes for such Power transition include a fundamental change in the bases of power, from such traditional factors as economic resources, strategic locations, and political influences to the modern bases like knowledge, technology, and information. Toffler also discusses the organizational dimensions of power changes in the 1990’s and asserts that a new type of conflict will emerge between the workers of the Second Wave and the Third Wave on the basis of the advancement of their knowledge, or what is tactfully referred to as the Brain